The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change

What I’m taking away from this passage is that social change 1) can be small and 2) collaborative.

Under Short Changed, there is the story of Raejone who applied for housing and didn’t hear a response until she demanded one. This small act, in the grand scheme of things, was met with a reply: she was offered housing. I never really thought about filing a complaint or being persistent at calling as social change because we’ve talked about things on such a large scale. However, because she got the agency to change the way it handled a customer, if only for her, made a difference.

In another post made on this blog, there seemed to be a contradictory sense in the passage, and I must agree that I felt it too. Cushman took the guise of the people that she was trying to study and help. Although she did thank them, it felt off. They relinquished their names and reputations so that she could write about them and they’re stories and she…was able to do that and make things more aware? Something felt weird. She mentioned coming off as self-aggrandizing but not being it and it didn’t feel true.

However, I felt as though the entire passage should’ve been written in the “teacher-student with students-teachers” voice. Social change is collaborative and involves many voices, not just one voice projecting what he/she thinks about other people.